But here’s the rub: for his trouble, Higgins has enjoyed middling success at the cash register and a critical reputation somewhere between ho and hum. Like a select handful of equally sharp, stylish, cynically funny writers, including Donald E. Westlake and Ross Thomas, Higgins never gets his due. Too clever to be popular and not solemn enough to be taken seriously by high-minded critics, he has made an oxymoron out of the phrase “popular novelist.”
If any of this bothers Higgins, he hasn’t let it affect his fiction. His latest novel, Bomber’s Law (296 pages. Holt. $22.50), is one of his best books and plainly the work of a man who knows his craft inside and out. The plot is disarmingly simple. Two Massachusetts state cops, one old, one young, are tailing and trying to nail Short Joey Mossi, a mob hit man. Around this armature, Higgins spins a nicely complicated tale. The two cops, young Harry Dell’Appa and Bob Brennan, hate each other as much as they despise Mossi, and their ruptured relationship sends what ought to be a straightforward story into a briar patch of confused allegiances. In the end, justice is served, but backstabbing and revenge play roles of unseemly importance.
In Higgins’s world, no motive is pure, and nothing is ever what it seems, not even Joey Mossi, whose routines are as “reliable as disorder and early sorrow.” Mossi, it turns out, has a retarded kid brother whom he takes care of. Lock up Mossi, Brennan points out, and you also condemn the brother to a life in state institutions.
A whiz of a stylist with a black belt in dialogue, Higgins lets his characters’ conversation carry the story. This is our language as it is spoken, full of false stops and loony poetry. Apartment hunters explain themselves to their current landlord, saying, “We got our eyes peeled, you know? With some luck, a little bigger. Maybe closer the Square, get the groceries home, huh? Anna subway-stop, right? Make it easier, wintertime there.” And Higgins’s lowlifes are, in their way, as eloquently disputatious as Wittgenstein:
“‘It wasn’t right after,’ Ernie said, ‘I didn’t say it was that. I said it was right around, after, after they found Chuckie’s head’.”
“Bomber’s Law” gives you more than just good talk. You learn how stolen cars get recycled, what goes on in a dog-track kennel and how short legs can doom a promising boxer to Palookaville. There are also quick but knowing disquisitions on aging, filial devotion and the little lacerations that over time make a marriage go bad. This year has seen no better novel than “Bomber’s Law.” Its plot and characters are freshly minted, its observations about life are savvy. If the world were a just place (whaddya nuts?), this book would make Higgins a fortune and burnish his critical reputation forever.
